Author: Charles

I found some discarded books and discovered a copy of Mein Kampf translated into Japanese, “waga touzou.”

It has been cold and rainy this autumn, so on a whim I pulled out some old Kodak PhotoCD scans I took on a sunny summer quite a few years ago. I brought them into the new Photoshop CS for color correction, the new version works wonderfully with the native 16 level LAB format on PhotoCDs. This first photo seems nicely moody, and is almost exactly what is recorded on the 35mm slide. I couldn’t improve on the exposure curves, it was very accurate.





I took a few photos to test out this cheap $75 secondhand Canon AE1, and the lens just wasn’t up to snuff, too much lens flare and insufficient sharpness. But the color intensity was wonderful.





The pictures seem to work OK at 72 DPI but I can’t help but think the final reduced photos would be a lot sharper if the camera lens was sharper. Still, 2048×3072 rez was pretty good, way back in about 1994 when I took these pictures. I still have the Canon camera and it’s still a piece of junk.

I’m looking at the world through rose colored sunglasses, and it’s horribly depressing. I had a new prescription for my eyeglasses, and I noticed my clip-on sunglasses got scratched, so I had the sunglasses lenses replaced too. The new lenses have a severe magenta tint, instead of the perfectly neutral gray in the original lenses. The optician said there’s nothing they could do about it, but they’d give me a discount on my next pair of prescription lenses. Sorry, that was the last time I spend $250 at their establishment.

This probably wouldn’t be a problem for the average eyeglass customer, but I am an artist and often work in prepress as a color separator, people use my services because of my accurate color vision. If I wear heavily tinted lenses for a prolonged period, it can ruin my sense of color balance. So I hardly ever wear my rose colored sunglasses.

The difference in what I see through the tinted lenses is dramatic. The sky is always a dark, brooding color, and full of fluffy pink clouds. This was kind of amusing during the summer, but now that it’s fall, things look incredibly different. The grass and trees look brown and dead. If any foliage shows the slightest autumnal color change, it looks completely brown. The tree in front of my house is dropping leaves, they’re still bright green as they lay on the grass, but they look brown to me. This is horribly depressing, I feel like I’m walking through a dead world.

But at least I have a few moments of amusement. I can spot artificial hair color a mile away. If anyone has dyed hair, even the most natural color, I see it as bright purple.

I recently found an old gadget I bought a long time ago. I saw this little cookie cutter in a mail order catalog, and immediately I saw the potential for a sculpture project. This little gadget would be perfect for incising letters in clay or wet cement. It reminded me of a strange old photo I saw in an Art History lecture, it was taken around 1900, it showed a man pushing a big paint roller down a Paris sidewalk, printing the Cinzano logo right onto the pavement.






The kit advertised 26 letters and 10 numbers, so obviously I had to buy two kits, since I might need double letters for some words. Fortunately the kits were cheap, only about $5. But you can imagine my disappointment when I opened the kits, and found this:





The packaging is correct, it contains 26 letters. They just didn’t include all 26 letters. Both kits were identical. I’m throwing the whole mess in the trash, it’s totally useless.

I’m putting up this trackback link for Metafilter readers that might want to see the original idea that this guy stole from me. I first did this well over a year ago.

I don’t mind people stealing my idea half as much as I mind people not giving me credit for
the invention. My only consolation is that they did a lousy job.